Them
by DomesticatedWerewolves
Summary: Nathanial gloats to his friends that he lives near a mansion full of monsters. His mother tells him to stop bragging, for his words will get him into trouble one day. And they do.


How does present tense even work though.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Hellsing.

**Summary:** Nathanial gloats to his friends that he lives near a mansion full of monsters. His mother tells him to stop bragging, for his words will get him into trouble one day. And they do.

**Warnings:** Assault, stalking, and choking (all on a minor). Also fire. Message me if you want me to elaborate/ask about anything.

I got this idea while writing _Winter Will Come_. I liked the idea of having a house near the Hellsing mansion. Not exactly on the grounds, but close enough for some things to affect them. Messed up things.

Of course, it's set before the events of the books. There is maybe a little overlap.

xxx

**Them**

**One-Shot**

xxx

Third period math. Nathanial Whitt isn't paying attention and is instead doodling in the margins of his notebook. He uses the lines on the paper to make the top and bottom edges of a square almost perfect.

He is eleven.

Nate is thinking about the pops he heard last night. His mother says that they are just kids setting off firecrackers down the street, but to Nathanial they sound like gunshots. He hears them almost every night; _pop pop pop_ he hears when he opens his window, no matter the temperature outside, and sticks his head out into the moonlight. Sometimes they are a little louder. A bigger gun. The wind ruffles his hair and turns the tip of his nose to ice, but he strains his ears for more.

The trees around his house separate him from the mansion down the street. Without them, he might be able to see whoever was shooting those guns. Nathanial has tried standing on the roof, climbing from the attic window to stand on the shingles. There the wind didn't just tease his hair but tore at it, and he squinted his eyes to look over the forest and see the very top of a roof. Then his father saw him standing precariously close to becoming paralyzed and a slow death and screamed at him to get down.

"I just want to see that house," he said petulantly as his mother placed a cup of tea in front of him to warm him up afterwards.

"Leave them be," his mother said, putting a careful spoonful of sugar in the tea. "Leave them to their business."

Sometimes trucks drive up their road to the strange mansion. Trucks driven by sullen men in uniforms. Nathanial watches them and tries to develop x-ray vision, so he can see their contents.

In math class, Nathanial finishes his doodle: a large house peering out of scraggly trees. Sometimes he adds something special to the drawing, like a dragon curled up on the front lawn, or a giant yeti creeping behind it. But nothing today – he thinks it's perfect the way it is. His stomach leaps in excitement at just the thought.

He knows that there isn't actually a dragon in the mansion. Nathanial has seen the monsters that lurk beyond those walls. Last summer, when the nights had been growing short but immeasurably dark, Nate and his sister had walked through the woods at dusk, seeing how close they could get to it before either one of them chickened out and wanted to go home.

Nathanial had finally gone right up to the edge of the forest that separates him from the greatest mystery in his short life. His sister was crying because he had dragged her farther than she wanted to go, though she wouldn't say specifically that she wanted to go back.

"Nate! Nate don't get so close!" she cried, her cheeks red. She was only six. What did she know of adventure?

There was a wall. The mansion had a wall. Nathanial's heart thumped at the sight of the two guards in front of the gate. They were wearing helmets that limited their peripheral view and they didn't see him standing in the shadows. He felt accomplished and stealthy, like a monster himself, like he could sneak passed those guards and get into the grounds. Into the mansion itself. Talk to the monsters and dissolve into their ranks.

But just as he was about to step out from the dark cover of the trees, another figure walked through the gates and slid up behind one of the guards. The guard jumped when the figure nudged him in the side, but quickly leaned his head back. The newcomer was tall, taller than Nathanial's own father, with wide shoulders. He had to stoop to whisper in the guard's ear. He was dressed in a red coat, the clothing underneath so black that all Nate could see were a few buttons. His hair could have been black or it just could have been the light. The sunlight was behind the figure and Nate couldn't make out any features until he looked up.

Nathanial's legs turned to water when he caught a glimpse of the man's face. His eyes were red like the bellies of the clouds in the light of the dying sun. His grin was wide and his teeth were sharp. Nate's eyes locked with the man's, and for a horrifying moment he could hear clear, crisp words in his head.

_Come on over, boy. _The man's eyes pulled him closer; they were hypnotizing. The red bleeds into the white and encompassed the world. Nathanial lifted his foot to take a step toward the man. His movements were stiff. Behind him, his little sister was so afraid that she screamed as if in pain.

"If you leave me here I'll tell mom! I'll tell mom you went with a _stranger_!" She ran up to him and took her little fist and slammed it on his shoulder. Nathanial barely flinched. She rounded on the figure in front of the sun. "Leave him alone!" She took a stone off the forest floor and threw it at him. It fell short by several feet, but the man was already gone and Nathanial was rubbing his shoulder.

His sister collapsed to the ground and started sobbing hard. Nathanial continued to stare at the place where the man had been, even though the guards had started walking towards them. One of them shouted _hey_ and it broke him out of his trance; Nate grabbed his sister's hand and they ran together.

The bell rings. It is lunch period and Nate finds his friends quickly enough, they trade bagged lunches because their mothers have not yet realized that one of them hates turkey but another loves it, or one hates the apple cider that her mother packs in the fall. They all gather at a round table and slide their bags to the respective friend.

"Did ya see another monster, Nate?" one of his friends says, smiling around a mouthful of bologna. He and the rest of them giggle, because Nathanial always tells them about the house, and though they like to think that they don't believe, each day they like to hear about it.

But sometimes Nathanial doesn't just talk about the gunshots.

He has been saving a certain story for nearly a week. He leans forward, shifting in his seat while he chews his sandwich, and gives them all a devilish grin. Subconsciously he is trying to copy the terrifying, sharp grin of the man.

"Last week, I saw someone walking up my street." He lies about the time. Wouldn't want them to know just how eager he was to tell them. One of his friends opens his mouth to protest, probably to say that _that isn't so special_ but Nathanial cuts him off and continues. "It was the same red man who tried to hypnotize me and bring me back to his lair." He mimes grabbing someone and holding them close to his chest.

One of his friends muffles her shriek of joy and terror with her hands. Another pounds his feet against the floor in excitement. Nathanial basks in the admiration of his friends. He is indeed brave for living so close to them.

"Anyway, he was walking up my street, and he stopped in front of my house." Now Nathanial feels a little unsettled just thinking about it. He hasn't told his mother yet, even though he had been frightened to near tears. But it had been a good fear. "I woke up and went to the window and he was _there_. And he smiled that smile at me, with his teeth. His _shark teeth_."

Nathanial does not mention how sneaky he had been that night, peeking out under the curtain, certain that the man couldn't see him. The street light hadn't been on, but the moon had been high and had turned everything grey. Everything except the bright red of the man standing in the middle of the street. And even though Nathanial had been almost absolutely sure that he couldn't be seen, the man had locked eyes with him. Unlike last time, Nathanial did not go into a trance. He fully felt the fear inside his heart.

"How can you sleep?" one of them asks.

Though he laughs, Nathanial doesn't know.

xxx

"Mom _stoppit_." Nathanial squirms as his mother tries to wipe his face with a washcloth. Yes, his face is dirty, but he's just going out again. "It's just gonna get dirty _again._"

"Then I will wash it again," she murmurs, scrubbing his cheeks.

The phone rings. "Don't move," his mother says, and her eyes mean business. Nate sulks next to the kitchen sink, wondering why he can't just wash his own face.

After a relatively cheerful greeting, his mother grows silent. Her face goes white. Her lips thin to nothing. When she speaks again, her voice is thin and cracks. "What do you mean?"

Nathanial strains his ears and catches a few tinny snippets of conversation. The kitchen is silent enough to allow him that much. _Your son has been spreading lies_. _We would prefer it if he stopped. _His stomach turns to ice. He feels his face blanch. Cold spreads throughout his body.

His mother looks at him as if she has never seen him before. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth opens and closes for a moment, as if gasping for air, before she is able to speak again. "What…_lies_?"

_Lies, Mrs. Whitt. Your son seems to be under the impression that we house monsters. Word has gotten back to us, and we would prefer it if he stopped. _

His mother gives him a look, the likes of which he has never seen before. It is full of horror and fear. His mother knows of the monsters; she has seen them, the man in red stepping out of a cab in the dead of night. Sometimes he does not even look like a man.

She hangs up the phone but is still unable to speak. Nathanial starts to cry hysterically, his breath coming in sharp gasps, hot tears on his face.

"I wasn't lying, mum!" he cries. "You know I wasn't! _You know!"_ His voice picks up a screechy quality.

"And that is why you cannot tell anyone!" His mother screams. Screams like he has never heard her do so before. Nathanial cries harder. "You cannot tell anyone because they have killed for less! If they think that we are a liability they will come after us!" She grabs for him with hands like claws, and probably only wants to hold him close and know that they were still alive and there, but Nathaniel is scared, and he runs.

His mother yells after him and attempts to give chase, because he is running into the woods and towards the mansion, but he is faster than her by a wide margin, and soon he can only hear the sounds of his feet crunching dead leaves. He runs farther, though, until his lungs burn and his breath wheezes through his throat and his face is hot.

He trips and lands hard on his knees, crying out when the hard winter ground sends blunt pain up his kneecaps. Nathanial curls forward and gasps into his hands. It is dusk and it is cold and he doesn't know where he is.

"Boy." A deep, dark voice makes his lungs freeze.

Nathanial sits up and sees the monster in red standing not ten feet away. His heart leaps into his throat and blocks his scream. The boy scrambles backwards away from the tall figure, whose red coat was so bright even though the sun was hiding behind the trees. Nathanial turns away from him, terrified, and curls up on the ground, covering his ears with his hands and trying to will the nightmare away.

"Boy," the voice forces its way passed his palms. "What are you doing here?"

A strong hand grabs his hair and pulls his head away from his hands. Nathanial yelps and there is a hand around his neck, four fingers pressing the air out of him and a thumb painfully squeezing the top of his jaw, sending pressure into his eye and making it feel like it was going to burst.

"I'm sorry I told about you," Nathanial says, his voice a rasp of what little air he had in his lungs. The hand squeezes tighter and his head is starting to feel a strange combination of heavy and light.

The monster makes a _shhh_ sound, like a snake's hiss, and Nathanial feels cold breath on his shoulder. He lets out a sob before blacking out.

He wakes up hours later, shivering. He has been shivering for so long that his body aches. He can see his own breath in the cold air, and there are pine needles and wet leaves stuck to his face. Light spills over him, from his father's flashlight.

"Oh thank God!" Nathanial's father scoops him up and holds his tiny shivering frame to his chest.

The tale almost spills out of his mouth, but Nathanial stops himself. He feels the premature bruise on his throat and clamps his lips together, though the phrase and story is repeating in his mind, over and over, _the monster found me and I survived._

xxx

"You have been really quiet, Nate," his mother says one day when he comes home from school. His friends have all said the same thing at school for the past week.

"I am fine," Nathanial says, putting his backpack on the floor. He goes to the kitchen pantry and finds a can of chicken noodle soup. He warms his cold hands in the radiating heat from the coil burner.

His mother watches him pour the boiling hot soup, which was mostly broth with some soggy noodles and fatty bits of chicken, into a bowl. He sits down at the table and eats it silently. He used to bring meals he ate alone into the living room to watch television, but now all he does is stare at the soup in his bowl.

She steps up anxiously to him. "Please tell me if there is something bothering you."

"Nothing is bothering me," Nathanial says, chewing the mushy noodles. "I am tired. I'm gonna take a nap after this." He raises the bowl to his mouth and gulps down the leftover broth. He puts his dish in the sink with his mother following him and then heads upstairs.

He gently closes the door in his mother's worried face.

Alone, Nathanial takes off his socks and rubs the bare, callused sole of his foot against his bedroom rug. He climbs into bed, still in his school jeans, and hides under the quilt, letting darkness envelope him.

He is not truly tired, but the comforting, smothering dark gives him some sort of peace, as the bed sheets used to act as his fortress when he had been small and afraid. Nathanial closes his eyes and there is that featureless monster again, and he swears he feels the pressure of that hand on his throat, the texture of gloves on his skin.

He can't breathe.

His mother has confused his excitement for fear. It is a quiet excitement, the subtle contemplation of what transpired in those woods at dusk. The memory makes his stomach twist. He sucks in a breath of pure exhilaration and it sticks in his quivering lungs.

His mother's low wail is muffled by the quilt, but Nate hears it anyway, and sits straight up in bed. He races to his window and looks outside, not even caring to draw the curtains. Out on the street he would be in plain sight. Not even a challenge for the monster, who was walking up the street.

Nathanial's heart beats so loud he is sure that the monster can hear it. His muscles clench, and he draws his shoulders up in preparation for it to look up at him, to acknowledge him in some way.

But the monster ignores him, passes the house, and vanishes into the woods at the dead end of the street. Not even a twitch in his direction. Not a smirk at the boy blatantly standing in the window.

"But…" Nathanial's voice is a dismal whisper. He returns to his bed, leaving his previous excitement by the window, still looking down into the street.

His mother calls him down for dinner hours later, sounding as if a weight has been lifted off her shoulders. Nathanial has been lying in the early December dark for quite some time. His fingers are cold and he slides out of bed and walks downstairs, melancholy and listlessness tugging at his mouth.

He knows this sadness is foolish. He is being ignored by them, and that is the greatest blessing he could receive. Being on their radar meant having the monster watching him from across the street for its own amusement, getting threatening phone calls, and having the Sword of Damascus hanging over the entire house. Being in their gaze was like being under the harsh red gaze of an angry god.

Nathanial slides into his chair at the dinner table, and the rest of his family is already talking eagerly about their days. His sister learned how to sew in her class. She is showing them the doll she made. It is blond with lopsided eyes. His silence spreads across the table to them.

"Would you like to talk to us, Nate?" his father says, sliding some peppers onto Nathanial's plate. His father is still suffering from the image of his son lying crumpled on the forest floor, his skin ice cold, his lips cracked and dry. "I know what happened was scary, but I think it would be best if you -"

"I was not scared," Nathanial says, though yes, that night he had been terrified. But it had been thrilling, too. He takes a drink of water and swallows carefully.

"But now do you understand why we don't want you going over there, or talking about them?" his mother asks. Nathanial doesn't answer, instead staring at his plate and pushing food around. So she continues with, "They are not _bad_ people, Nate. They just enjoy their privacy, for obvious reasons."

The obvious reason is the red monster. Nathanial wonders how it got there, why it is there; somehow the idea of a hellish demon living in a mansion not a mile from his house is the strangest thing of all. He has never thought that it would be possible for something like that to happen near where they had strung white Christmas lights into the front bushes this past Wednesday. He expects this to happen to people living in the city itself, or in more unfamiliar places. But never here.

How could they be eating so close to where a monster prowled?

xxx

Nathanial wakes very suddenly one night.

His eyes shoot open, forcing his body into wakefulness so quickly that it makes him dizzy. His eyelids are heavy and he starts to drift off to sleep again, but something keeps him from doing so.

His bedroom is dimly lit by a hellish orange glow. This knocks all thoughts of sleep form his mind, and he sits up in bed. The glow is coming from outside, and it flickers. Nathanial slides out of bed and curls his toes against the cold floor, starting to shiver once he was away from his blankets. He opens his window and leans out, glad that his house gives him a relatively good view of the general area of the mansion.

The horizon is a blazing orange, with a ball of bright red in the middle. The world smells like hell and smoke.

Nathanial slams the window down and stands there for a minute, his mind so full of panic and fear that he cannot do anything else. And then, as if a nightmare had just flung him from sleep, he runs to his parents room and bursts in screaming.

"_Mom, dad; their house is on fire!_"

"What?" His father's voice is muffled by sleep and he is unaware of what is going on but his son is screaming and his heart feels like it will explode. He shoots up in bed with his eyes still half closed and his mouth slack. "What's going on?"

"Their house is on fire!" Nathanial pulls at his father's arm. His mother is rubbing her eyes and his father begins to shake with adrenaline.

"Whose house?" he asks and Nate can tell he dreads the answer.

"Their house."

His father rolls out of bed with a groan. "They probably have the fire department coming already. Come, you'll be able to hear the sirens." They go to the window and they open it and lean out into the glowing night, but all they hear is the unnatural sound of a world silenced by catastrophe.

And then the knocking.

It is a group of neighbors, still in slippers and robes, some with coats thrown over pajamas. "We are going to help them," Mr. Green says, flipping up his coat's collar to block the cold.

"Are you mad!?" Nathanial's father cries, shivering in the cold.

Mr. Green grits his teeth so they don't chatter and speaks through them. "If that demon of theirs has finally killed them all and set the place to burn down, there is no one to call the department. If the forest catches it will spread here in no time. We are going to help and keep it from doing so."

They leave and Nathanial's dad watches them go with worry wrinkling his face.

"Dad are we gonna go?"

"No." His father closes the door. "_I _am going to do. You are going to stay here."

"But dad!" Nathanial follows his father as he grabs his coat and slips barefoot into shoes.

"No. You have already had your first strike against them, and if this goes sour I don't want you to be there and earn your second." His father is out the door before Nathanial can protest anymore. The faint smell of smoke lingers even after the door is closed.

Nathanial stands still for a moment, hot and childish rage in his gut. He wants to scream but instead he finds his shoes and winter coat and even his gloves, taking his time because he wants his dad to catch up with the others before he goes out. His mother is calling for them from the top of the stairs and he slips out before she can come down.

The night is cold and the closer he gets to the mansion the brighter and redder it becomes. Smoke starts to blur the world and his eyes water. He can soon hear voices and, as he gets closer, the hiss and crackle of a massive fire. As Nathanial walks through the forest, he feels as if something is bearing down on him, something cold and dark in contrast to the hot red of the fire. The forest is quiet save for the sounds up ahead but every so often he hears a bird fly overhead, away from the fire. He wonders if the forest already caught.

When Nathanial emerges, he breaks into hell.

There is a hole in the wall surrounding the estate, right next to the gates, which has been knocked down. The entire right arm of the mansion reaches orange and yellow fingers into the sky. As he watches through the wall, a section of the roof collapses with an all-consuming roar. The lawn is on fire in sections, as is a small shed near the wall. There were several boughs that had grown over the wall and over the shed. They were burning, but not too quickly.

One of the neighbors is standing at the front gates, talking frantically on their cellphone. When they see him, they shout a warning to him, telling him to go home, but he races into the estate to get a better look.

The first thing he sees is his father talking to an elderly man in a butler or servants uniform. Their conversation is heated and his father isn't yelling but his hands are moving rapidly. He is gesturing to the group of neighbors who are holding buckets of sand and water, ready to curb the fire in the trees, but the other man is pointing from the dozen or so soldiers doing the same, and then back at the house, which was still burning.

"We have it under control!" the older man yells over the sound of a tree knot popping like a gunshot.

"Just let us help! We have put up with this organization and its questionable members for years! Let us put out the fire in the trees before it gets out of hand!"

The older man hesitates for a moment, but then shakes his head and starts speaking to Nathanial's father in a much softer voice. Nathanial's father's face goes slack in terror. He starts to head back towards the neighbors, keeping his steps measured.

When he sees Nathanial standing near the wall he throws the relatively calm demeanor away and his eyes widen. He screams "_Nate what are you doing?_" just as Nathanial feels something cold grab his shoulders.

"Hello, boy," something hisses in his ear. The voice is not that of the monster but of an entirely different demon. They have the same kind of grip though; a tight hold on his jaw and neck that they use as leverage to drag him across the yard towards the burning house.

A tall woman is coming out of the mansion as they approach. Her suit is dirty with ash and soot and she has an armful of papers. When she sees Nathanial in front of her, she stops and stares.

"What have you done with my servant?" she asks, not really sounding all that worried about her monster.

"I staked him and left him as ash somewhere in the woods." The monster holding him dragged him closer to the entrance. "Now out of my way, woman."

She steps to the side, her mouth thin and tight. "All you did was stake him?" she asks, and a corner of her mouth twitches. She is ignored.

The house is murky with black smoke, and Nathanial starts coughing almost immediately. Tears stream down his face and his eyes burn, and the hand around his throat goes from uncomfortable and constricting to nearly choking him. He cannot breathe, and digs his nails into his captor's hand. Finally they let go of his throat and he gasps for air while they continue pulling him along by the hood of his coat.

The fire is spreading to the middle part of the mansion and the foyer. The first tongues of flame are on the ceiling, and his captor takes him through a door frame that's wreathed in fire, making Nathanial curl his arms in close as it becomes hot enough to cause pain.

They run through hallways that are choked with black smoke. Nathanial's lungs and throat burn from gulping down the smog. The monster seems to know where they are going, stopping just short of walls of fire and starting anew on a less dangerous path. Nathanial tries to stop him, digging his heels into the carpet and pulling against the hold the monster had on his hood. Eventually the coat rips, and for a moment he is free, but then Nathanial is grabbed by the wrist and they continue deeper into the burning mansion.

The monster holding him finally stops near one door. The knob on the door is hot enough to warp the air around it, so the monster kicks it down instead. Nathanial is ignoring this going on and is instead focusing his attention on the fire at the end of the hall, opposite the way they came, and of the distant groan of the annex collapsing in sections.

The room isn't burning completely yet, though a set of curtains is on fire, but Nathanial knows it is only a matter of time until the fire out in the hall spreads here. It is full of metal filing cabinets. His captor releases his wrist and looks him in the eye and tells him, "Do not move, boy. I am your only hope of getting out of here alive, and you are mine."

Nathanial watches as the other monster starts going through each of the filing cabinets, sorting through the manila envelopes inside, searching for something. In their agitated state, Nathanial can see that despite their sharp teeth and red eyes, they are trembling just as hard as he is.

Smoke starts billowing in from under the door. The brass knob is warping. Nathanial moves away from the door and towards the desk at the head of the room, near the windows. He is sweating and peels off his coat, watching the frightened, frantic monster rip through files and folders in his pajamas.

The monster is able to search all of the cabinets in a quick minute. They stand back, their fanged mouth gaping wide. "They were supposed to be here!"

"Of course they're not. Didn't you think to check the papers that my master was carrying out _first_?"

Nathanial jumps. The monster in red is next to him without him ever noticing, the outline of his form stretching out creeping tendrils into the flickering shadows. The door is on fire and Nathanial presses close to the other wall and the windows, yearning for the fresh air outside. His mind is going foggy from lack of oxygen.

He keeps his eyes open slightly as the monster in red steps towards his captor, who screams and begs and tries to flee out the door, but the knob burns their palm and turns their screams high. The red demon grabs the other, smaller monster by the back of his neck and holds him up.

With the other monster squirming and shrieking in his hands, the monster takes a moment to regard Nathanial. "Look away, boy." When Nathanial doesn't at first, the monster raises his eyebrows expectantly.

Nathanial closes his eyes. _Cover your ears too_. He does so, clapping sweaty palms on the sides of his head. He can still hear a muffled squawk and a crunch that makes him taste acrid bile at the back of his tongue. Something wet splashes across his face. He starts to shake because he is sure it is blood, and he keeps his eyes clenched shut even when something massive picks him up.

"I could eat you now, boy, and blame it on the scum there." The voice that speaks this ring in his ears; it sounds of hundreds of baying hounds, like an army's battle cry screamed from all around. A tongue like a dog's licks the blood from his face. "It would serve you right for putting yourself in such danger time and time again."

Nathanial is still and silent. His face relaxes but he doesn't open his eyes. He doesn't know what to do, knowing that begging didn't work. His kidnapper had tried that and it only got him killed. So his mind is blank with a fear that is so great he is engulfed by it, and he can't distinguish himself from it; he is almost in a meditative state from it. The insides of his eyelids are colored orange from the fire that is all around them, and he wonders what is worse: burning alive or being eaten by this demon.

He feels the pressure of a hundred million small teeth on his neck, and his body tenses. There is a sharp _Alucard!_ and Nathanial's eyes snap open out of shock.

Instead of facing a monstrosity with enough teeth to wrap around his thin neck several times, Nathanial is standing facing the woman from before. She has a white cloth over her nose and mouth to protect herself from the smoke, and sweat runs down her face. She blinks a lot to clear her eyes. The fire burns around her and the door she is standing in but she is unharmed.

The monster is beside him, a hand on his shoulder, still tall and threatening but otherwise human-looking. He regards the woman with an unreadable expression. "I have destroyed the target, master."

"Give me the boy," she says through her teeth. The fire licks at her long hair but she doesn't seem to care. "I want you to try and salvage any of the files we have here."

Nathanial doesn't move at first, though the woman is holding out her hand for him to take, and she looks far less terrifying than her monster. Then he is nudged forward, and she grabs his hand and tells him to run if he can.

The front yard is in an uproar. The neighbors are split between containing the fire in the trees, which isn't out yet but hasn't spread, and helping the soldiers carry important papers and documents out of the mansion. There is a single fire engine on the grounds, its occupants talking with some of the soldiers about where the water source is so that they can hook up their hoses properly. Nathanial can hear the wails of several more on the way.

The woman leads him out of the burning house and sits him on the steps leading up to it, where a crowd of people have gathered upon seeing him. Nathanial scans the people in front of him and can pick out some neighbors but not his father.

"There is an ambulance on the way," the woman says, making him look at her. "I want you to take several deep breaths and then walk with me away from the house."

Nathanial does as he is told, gulping down the significantly clearer air in methodical inhalations, as he would do at the doctor's office. His head clears a little and he feels hot, fat tears slide out from under his eyelids and streak down his face.

His father pushes his way between two people and grabs Nathanial, both in an effort to get closer to him, and to get him as far away from them as possible. He lifts him into a tight hug but to Nathanial it feels far too much like the monster holding him.

His father speaks to the woman for a while, long enough for the rest of the fire engines and ambulances to get there. Nathanial is carried to an ambulance and given an oxygen mask, along with the woman. For some reason he expects her to decline it, but instead she holds it to her face and sits next to him, her legs shaking as she lowers down onto the grass.

They watch her house. "Do you understand why I told you to stay away?" she says, her breath fogging the inside of the mask. Nathanial nods.

The monster appears at the front door of the mansion, a blazing red figure amongst the bright yellow of the firemen and the dull pajamas and coats of the neighbors. He isn't carrying anything, despite the woman's orders to salvage files.

"I know you think he is interesting," the woman says. "That he is something exciting. And while I cannot deny that there is never a boring moment here, I cannot allow a child such as yourself to become mixed up in it. You _will_ stay away, or I cannot guarantee your safety."

The monster looks across a yard of people scrambling to put out the fire and grins at him with an open mouth.

xxx

Nathanial does stay away. He goes on winter break and celebrates Christmas. He returns to school and celebrates his twelfth birthday. Months pass and whenever he sees the trunks he hides inside; whenever he feels the dark presence of the monster Alucard outside his window he stays in his bed and calms his racing heart.

One night in August or September – he cannot clearly remember, but school had recently started – he hears someone speaking outside his window. Their voice starts out distant and slowly but steadily grows closer, and Nathanial cannot help but take a peek outside.

Immediately he can feel the terror in his heart at the sight of the monster. The back of his neck tingles coolly.

But then he sees the woman walking next to him, talking idly, nervously, obviously trying to fill the silence. Her voice is high and grows louder as they get closer to the woods, until a light in the house opposite Nathanial turns on, and the monster silences.

"Humans live in these houses. It would be wise to keep quiet as you pass."

They disappear into the forest. Nathanial feels his curiosity rise up and wedge itself in his heart. He wants desperately to follow them. Why did she get to go? Why not him?

But he stays in his room and lies awake, too frustrated to sleep. His legs hurt and he wants to jump up and run after them. He grabs fistfuls of his blanket and wraps it around him. But eventually the need flows away like water and he drifts back to sleep from exhaustion. He doesn't tell his friends the next day.

He keeps it to himself.

xxx

This sucker is twelve damn pages. I had hoped to hit maybe six or seven but not _twelve_. It is also about half a year in the making, with a long break in between for summer, where I really don't do anything but chastise myself for not doing anything.

But no seriously how does present tense even work I am never doing that shit again.


End file.
